Doug Elmore '86 Honored as Indiana HS Orchestra Teacher of the Year

February 5, 2014

Doug Elmore, orchestra teacher Floyd County Central High School and Highland Hills Middle School and 1986 graduate of DePauw University, is the Indiana American String Association’s high school orchestra teacher of the year.

"This award was wonderful because it was given and selected by a bunch of my peers — people who do this for a living," Elmore tells the Jeffersonville News and Tribune. "Being selected by your peers is great and there are a lot of really fine string instructors in Indiana who have done this for a long time. A lot of people other than me could have gotten this and I would have been fine."

A music education major at DePauw, he notes, "At both of the schools I teach at, I work very hard to make sure the orchestra isn’t just some peripheral thing, but an integral part of the school’s culture. I try to build relationships with the students and with the other teachers and administrators at these schools so that the students who are in the orchestra program feel highly valued, connected to the school, connected to me, connected to their instruments."

According to the newspaper's Jerod Clapp, "He and his students have set the record for the number of appearances at the Indiana State School Music Association’s state orchestra finals, going to the competition for the last 24 years."

Elmore adds, "Music isn’t supposed to be a thing for a select few people. It’s supposed to permeate an entire culture or civilization. The only way you can really succeed in doing that is to convince everyone of its value. No one has ever come to an orchestra concert here that I know of and walked away thinking, ‘none of that music spoke to me, I didn’t get any of that. I didn’t like any of that.’ That never happens."